LondONline

After some great preparation and brainstorming efforts, the London team is now newly established and restructured.

Please welcome the new Managers and Officers:

Activity Manager: Annette Detmer

* PR/Media Officer: Shruti Dudhia

* Events Officer: Timur Topalgoekceli

* Events Volunteer: Agnes Baritou

Business and Finance Manager: Bruno Alajouanine

* Fundraising Officer: Carlo Svaluto

* HR Officer: Daria

Editorial Manager: Karolin Schaps

* Online contributors: Abla Kandalaft, Laura Eid

The following positions are still to be filled:

* Online Editor

* New Media Officer

If you are interested in filling any of these positions, please email us your CV and a brief explanation of why you would like to fill this job: london@cafebabel.com

I joined the London Team of cafebabel.com in January 2007 and after the Festival of Europe the next big thing was the Celebration of the Europe Day, on the 9th of May. For it we decided to put on a different kind of event, a music party, with bands from different parts of Europe to spread the word about cafebabel.com but also to show how different European music influences meeting in London are reinventing and constantly shaping contemporary music.

So, how to stage something like that with no budget? First of all find good friends who are willing to help and are well placed in the field…..

The venue is the first problem; when you have no founds a usually successful way to secure a good place is to promise you'll bring lots of people which means the venue will get extra revenues generated from the extra people drinking from the bar. That was how we got hold of one of the best venues in East London, the Spitz Gallery. The Spitz is a bistro-gallery-music venue well knows in London for promoting and presenting the most interesting underground bands coming from all over the world. It is also based in a great location, the Old Spitafield market, or simply 'Spitalfields' which ‘lives’ between Liverpool street, the heart of the ‘City of London’, financial capital of London and Brick Lane, one of the most vibrant and innovative parts of the town, home of a flourishing creative community . Instead of being in the main music venue, the cafebabel.com party was staged in the Gallery, a spacious room facing on one side the busy Commercial road and on the other the interiors of the Spitafields with its old market style wooden and steel structure. On the day the gallery was also hosting an exhibition of Graffiti pictures which added to the melting pot of arts and styles in which we were diving.

Once you have the venue you have to find bands which, of course, will be willing to play for free. London has a great website called gumtree.com where, if you post an ad, you can be quite sure that you’ll have tens of answers in a couple of days for any kind of request. Gumtree is international but if you don’t have it in your city try to any young community websites, preferably on music. I posted an add saying exactly what I was looking for: band with European members who wanted to play for free but in one of the most famous venues of East London (the name Spitz, I have to say, really help). In less than a week I was overloaded with mails from bands of any provenience and genre and my job was to check their myspace page and decided the ones that I liked more. With the approbation of the other members of the London team I selected 2 bands (the other two where friends of mine). I meet the bands showed them the venue and talked about equipment requirements. That’s a very important part of the job as well. In our case, what we needed was quite minimal because the event was acoustic, but when organizing something like this, always ask what the bands need.

Here comes one the worst problem: the PA, for those who have no clue what that is ( I discover it only when I was organising the party), is the technical equipment you need for the gig such as the mixer, speakers, various leads, microphones, amplifiers, monitors etc. Unless you have a friend who can lend you one you have to rent it. That’s of course what we did, but we paid for it. It usually doesn’t cost an arm and a leg (we paid 50 pounds) but when you have no budget you need to invest yourself. There are places that rent it, but I suggest you to ask around and see if you can find somebody through friend that owns a PA and can rent it to you. That might be cheaper.

Then you need a sound engineer which you have to pay as well. Likely one of my friends, who is a sound engineer, agreed to do it for us for free.

Once all those things are sorted out you need to start with publicity. Write a catchy press release and contact International Cultural Institute who can put a notice on their websites for free. Is quite useful to put notices also on universities websites or propose interviews or articles for communities (one of our target were minority communities’ media) and students’ newspaper and radios. We designed a flyer and printed some black and white copies in house (…or from work…) and distributed those in bars and universities’ unions and we e-mailed it to all our contacts which then send it around to all their contacts and so on…..

Then the day comes, the venue is ready, sound check’s done, you just have to wait and hope that everything will turn out right……which in our case did, we had a great party, the bands were fantastic and we had a good number of people. I have to say that something like this involves a great degree of stress and work for at least couple of months before the event and you won’t see a penny for you, on the contrary you will have to put some money in, but I can promise you that it is also lots of fun and a chance to learn lots of things about managing and organizing events…..and you will want to do it again.

This post is in response to an opinion expressed by Ruth Lea, Director of the Global Vision think tank in the UK, on the BBC's "For and against the new EU treaty" (available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6914468.stm). Lea argues that the EU reform treaty is good for EU integration, which inevitably makes it bad for the UK. Her view is representative of a many people in the UK with whom I've spoken to about the European Union. One of her statements that summarizes this view and that provokes my reaction is when Lea states:

"Once enforced, there will quite simply be no more significant powers left solely with the governments of the member states, and outside the orbit of the EU's formal institutions. Of course, member states may still pursue their individual foreign and defence policies, for example, but their activities will be increasingly circumscribed by the EU and their national sovereignty diminished."

If one tIhinks of sovereignty as the power to redistribute wealth and the power to use force, then Lea's opinion is misguided and unhelpful as it feeds the sensationalized news depicting the EU as something like "The Blob," which is slowly taking over the competencies of member states.

This category is designed to publish Europe-related news snippits from London. We hope to create a little space which allows to give an overview of European news from London, which will hopefully encourage a bit of discussion.

Living in London is… by Laura

Welcome to this interactive category of the blog !

Our goal is to share and exchange insider knowledge of the Global City with you newcomer, temporary resident, Londoner born and bred, expat, city-hopper or future Londoner for life! All comments welcome!

Brick Lane.

Home of the Bangladeshi and the ‘alternative’ communities, prepare for the multi-kulti journey Brick Lane will take you through. For those who have had a spell at living in Berlin, welcome back! This area of the city has the same indie, alternative edge the German capital is renowned for. Live-in bars, beer gardens, clubs, live concerts, open-air art exhibitions, sheesha lounges, second hand stores, there’s no other place in London to chill out on a lazy or rainy week-end.

Hungry? Stop off for a bagel to whet your appetite at the top end of the street. The two neck-to-necks bagel shops offer the best New York buns in town as the steady queues indicate. Mint tea in one of the hazy Middle-Eastern sheesha lounges will wash down the snack and allow you unwind in their cushy chairs and eavesdrop the foreign conversations around you. Alternatively, hop into Benglatown in the southern part of the street for a budget and tasty meal from the sub-continent. Be sure to haggle the offers waiters waiting outside their restaurants will throw at you. Generally no alcohol on the menu so bring your own bottle from one of the near-by corner shops if you want to splash out.

One of the Indie crowd? Then dress the part! Leggings, bright neon tights, golden shoes, Robert Smith-like hairstyles, keffiehs, Converses full of holes. You’re going to have to in order to mingle with the art students, graphic designers, entrepreneurs of all sorts oozing coolness and detachment as they stroll in the Lane coffee in one hand and shades on their noses. Browse through the independent designer or second-hand clothes shops or through the adjacent indoor markets for that unique present you’ve been eying for your best bud. Vinyls, vintage dresses, past issues of Vogue, quirky household objects all available and exposed to the Fashionista’s heart content.